Improving 802.11 Fingerprinting of Similar Devices by Cooperative Fingerprinting

Fingerprinting 802.11 devices has been proposed to identify devices in order to mitigate IEEE 802.11 weaknesses. However, important limitations prevent any real deployment. On the first hand, fingerprinting has a low accuracy when the devices have similar hardware and software. On the second hand, attackers may forge signatures to impersonate devices. The authors propose Diversity, a cooperative fingerprinting approach that improves accuracy of existing fingerprinting methods while relying only on off-the-shelf hardware. Diversity improves fingerprinting up to the reliable individual identification of identical 802.11 devices.